The Treo 650 features a sizeable LCD touchscreen and a QWERTY keyboard. It feels well balanced to hold and it weighs 178 grams. On the top edge you’ll find a slot for MMS/SD Cards (with a blank to fill it when empty) and a SIM slot (making swapping Vodafone SIMs really easy), an infrared port and a switch for turning the ringer on and off (it vibrates when the ringer is off).

The metallic stylus slots into a hole just behind the curve of the top edge. On the rear is the VGA camera and a speaker for using in speakerphone mode. The 65Kcolour active-matrix screen has a 320 x 320 resolution and measures 44mm along each edge.

It's very bright meaning photos taken look excellent. The CPU is an Intel PXA270 running at a comfortable 312 MHz (the Treo isn’t designed for performance but it wasn’t sluggish when we used any of its applications). The operating system is Palm OS 5.4.

The Treo 650 starts and stops at the press of a button. PDAs can be confusing to navigate at times, but with a touchscreen and a stylus the process is greatly simplified.

You can, however, navigate single handedly with the Treo 650’s buttons. There are four shortcut buttons surrounding the four-way navigation key that has a central selection/confirmation button. Most of the buttons, including those on the side, can be configured to launch or work with a variety of applications.

In low light the keypad is quite usable and well illuminated. The navigation keys light up in blue (although the home and menu buttons are rather faint), with the call and disconnect buttons in the traditional green and red. The main QWERTY area is mostly dark lettering on a white background and the individual keys are illuminated from behind.

The numerical keypad has the reverse colour scheme with white lettering on a blue background. The Treo 650 is available from both Telecom and Vodafone (although the device can’t swap networks, you either get a Vodafone one or a Telecom one). The removable lithium ion battery is rated for a six hour talk time with a 12.5-day standby time.

Email
The VersaMail client supports POP and IMAP, so you can access your standard email account wirelessly wherever you are. We found VersaMail as easy to configure as any desktop email client, requiring just a few server names and passwords (Xtra mail, for example, was loaded as a pre-set) in the Telecom model we reviewed.

If messaging is a big part of your daily routine and you can afford the luxury, consider a PDA like the Treo 650. Once you’ve tried messaging with a QWERTY keypad you’ll probably never want to go back to a nine-key entry system. The Treo 650 doesn’t support character recognition using the touchscreen, however, which is a slight disappointment.

Applications
The Blazer web browser does a reasonable job of displaying optimised content and Palm has its own mobile portal with links to a useful range of mostly text-based sites. Your PDA contacts database can be kept synchronised with your desktop’s (including MS Outlook) and it has room for thousands of numbers and a variety of data fields that you can configure to your needs.

You can view and edit MS Office documents on the Treo 650 (using DataViz Documents to Go), and you can print them and images snapped with the camera using the Bluetooth connection with supporting printers. The Treo 650 offers a lot of value for smart users who want to tap into the data access that it provides for long-range roaming and the Bluetooth connectivity that it has for local device connections.

Overall, it handles more like a luxury phone than a product like the HP iPAQ H6365, for example, which handles more like a PDA. The Treo 650 is smaller and lighter and has simple, direct access to options albeit with fewer features.

For more information about Mobility visit the Mobile Business Research Pavilion.

November 2005

Treo 650